A Japan-based Taiwanese woman shipped 18kg of conch shells from Kanagawa Prefecture in Japan to Taitung County on Saturday to provide houses for hermit crabs and to help conserve the local crab population.
Lee Wei-yi (李葦儀), 33, has been collecting and transporting sea shells from seafood restaurants and sea farms in Kanagawa to Green Island (綠島) since 2012, when I-Shou University launched a hermit crab conservation program, she said.
Hermit crabs along Taiwan’s east coast have been spotted using bottle caps, empty bottles and even water facets as shells, and the university’s Department of Leisure Management initiated the program to collect donated shells to provide for the homeless hermit crabs, the department said.
The latest batch of shells Lee collected weighed 18kg and consisted of about 300 shells, including dozens of large-sized shells.
University research assistant Tai Wen-ying (戴文櫻) said that large shells are what is most lacking, as a species of land hermit crab, Coenobita brevimanus, could grow to the size of an adult woman’s fist, making it extremely difficult for those crabs to find a home.
Born in Keelung, Lee said she grew up in a beachside city before moving to Japan eight years ago for study.
She said that after reading about the program on the Internet, she started collecting conch shells as they are often discarded in Japan.
For more information, the program organizers can be reached by phone at 089-310-001.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching